Well, time for some idle speculation on the artillery piece that’s in the works. From my interview with HiTech at the Con this year…
HITECH: Yeah, Doug…I forget the name of the vehicle…it’s a towed artillery unit that he really wants to go do. It can compliment the bombers hitting the big cities. It will be a great unit for setting up artillery barrages against the town buildings.
This sounds cool, but begs the asking of other questions. Will this be worth adding before HTC improves on the cover-and-concealment portion of the game? Again, from the interview…
HITECH: For cover and concealment, I’d sort of want to go with…one of the things we’ve added in the last patch is two new object types. One’s called a “barrier” and the other is called simply a “structure.” Their properties are, a barrier can’t be destroyed. So we can put stuff into the terrain just for ground-to-ground concealment. Objects you can’t blow up or destroy to get rid of the other guy’s cover. It’s a true barrier.
SABRE: Would that be like a tree line or a hedgerow?
HITECH: Yeah, exactly. It could be a tree line, a hedgerow, or even just a small sand dune. It could be just a little hull-down bunker that we stick into the terrain. Either way, you can’t destroy it; you can’t get any points for it…that type of thing. The other new type, the “structure” type object, is meant for items like bridges. Its key aspect is both sides can destroy it. Right now, you can’t kill your own structures.
SABRE: Right.
HITECH: Well, if you have a bridge, some times you want to go blow up your own bridge so the enemy can’t attack you over it. So that’s what the “structure’s” purpose is. There’s really no strategic effect [of the structure itself], but it’s meant for bridges and other items that both sides can blow up. For instance, maybe you want to go blow the building up in this town…you don’t want points for it, but you want to remove it so you can go shoot the other guy, or drive through it. That’s where that’s headed.
The cover stuff [i.e. cover of ground vehicles from aircraft overhead]…I sort of like how IL-2 did their tree-type cover.
SABRE: The hovering layer up above the ground?
HITECH: Right. Right. I want to work along those lines, see what I can do to come up with cover for the vehicles from [aerial] observation. Something needs to be done there. I just haven’t had the time to work out the exact details yet, but it’ll come.
Un-camouflaged, these would be sitting ducks, even if you had the tow-vehicle nearby to provide some defensive fire. I think it would be great if, once you stopped to set up the arty, a camouflage net would automatically deploy over the tow vehicle and gun. This would hide them from airborne observation. Perhaps the netting would not hide the vehicles per se, but simply prevent getting an icon from the air.
Another idea is that you would actually deploy an entire battery of guns, say four, when you hit the “deploy” key to set up the guns. That way, dispersion and blast radius effects could be factored in, as well as make the arty battery a bit more damage resistant. Imagine the site of a dozen guns dropping fire on a town, or on an advancing enemy armored column. Imagine your own armored column calling in a smoke screen barrage to cover your advance. What are your impressions of artillery, and what it might bring to AH?
